from the there's-no-problem-if-you-can't-see-it dept

We've noted repeatedly that the Trump FCC has been engaged in some dubious-if-not-downright-comical behavior to try and justify their plan to kill popular net neutrality protections. These efforts have ranged from ignoring bot-driven fraudulent abuse of the agency's comment system to allegedly making up a DDos attack to try and downplay the "John Oliver" effect in the media, after Oliver highlighted the myopia of the FCC's efforts on his HBO program. The goal appears singular: sow doubt about the validity of the 20 million + comments made to the FCC, mostly in opposition to its plan.

FCC boss Ajit Pai has long insisted that net neutrality isn't a real problem, nor is the lack of broadband competition that creates such market dysfunction in the first place. As such, the agency under his leadership has also been fighting against FOIA requests to release the 47,000 net neutrality complaints filed with the agency since 2015. After all, they might show that net neutrality is a real problem, undermining Pai's claim that consumer protections on this front aren't necessary.

Hoping to dial up pressure on the agency, 16 consumer groups and organizations (including the EFF and the ACLU) penned a letter to the FCC this week urging them to make the complaints public. The core of their argument -- if the FCC is going to claim net neutrality protections and agency oversight of ISPs is largely unnecessary, it might be useful to discuss what the public has to say about things:

Over 47,000 consumer complaints have been submitted
against ISPs since June 2015, and carriers provided approximately 18,000 responses to those complaints, and there are 1,500 emails documenting interactions between the ombudsperson and Internet users. These numbers alone should give the Commission pause. However, only a full analysis of these consumer complaints and ombudsperson documents will allow the public to fully answer questions posed in the NPRM.

Of course a full, transparent analysis of the record is the very last thing Pai and friends want, since it would clearly show the agency is ignoring the public interest to the sole benefit of a handful of well-loathed telecom duopolies. That said, the groups are quick to point out that Pai's failure to address, analyze, and release all these documents for review and comment prior to the close of the current comment deadline (which is August 30 if you haven't chimed in yet) could result in the FCC running afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act.

So while the FCC had originally claimed that releasing these comments would be too "burdensome," it has quickly shifted its position to now claim that the agency will release the complaints eventually, once they're redacted. Maybe:

"Pursuant to FOIA, the FCC must redact any personal information from the over 47,000 documents that have been requested before they can be released," a spokesperson for Pai told Ars today. "Currently, commission staffers are in the process of reviewing these documents and redacting any personal information. We anticipate releasing another batch of documents by the end of the week and will release the remainder as soon as we can."

Whether or not "as soon as we can" will be defined as "after we've finalized a vote to kill the popular rules later this year" remains to be seen.

from the neat dept

So here's a bit of nice news. Yesterday EFF announced this year's Pioneer Award winners, and they included Chelsea Manning, Annie Game... and me. I'm humbled to win the award -- but especially to be included with Chelsea and Annie, both of whom have gone to amazing lengths, and often sacrificed tremendous amounts, to do what they believe in to help make the world a better place. I just write about stuff. If you read Techdirt, you probably know about Chelsea Manning already -- we've certainly written about her, what she's done for this country, and the travesty of the charges and punishment she faced. Frankly, it's a joke to put me in a list with Chelsea Manning. We don't belong in the same conversation, let alone getting the same award. As for Annie Game -- you might not know the name, but she's a force to be reckoned with as well. She runs IFEX, which is on the front lines around the globe -- especially in repressive authoritarian-led countries -- fighting to protect a press that has few legal protections and standing up for free expression and access to information in very real and tangible ways (and sometimes in dangerous environments). I aspire to do work that will someday put me on a level with the things both Chelsea and Annie have done -- but in the meantime, I'm happy to share this award with them.

If you have not been, the Pioneer Awards event is always a blast, so if you're in the area on September 14th, please consider coming out to the ceremony. Tickets help support EFF, and I think we all know just how much amazing work EFF has done over the years.

The fight to protect online privacy is happening on many fronts, but when it comes to the internet services we use every day, the best possible results will come from collaboration between users and providers. This week, we're helping Namecheap and the EFF take a step in that direction with the declaration of Internet Privacy Week and the unveiling of the Internet Privacy Bill Of Rights.

The goal is to get online service providers to agree to uphold privacy by respecting five key user rights with respect to their data and how it is collected and used: transparency, control, recourse, export, and due process. The focus of the bill is on openness and control, leaving plenty of room for providers to do innovative things with data while ensuring users have full knowledge of what's happening and a say in how their data is used. Read more about the five rights on the Privacy Week campaign page.

There are two important things you can do to help out -- and just by doing so, you'll be raising money for the EFF:

Sign the Bill Of Rights! Namecheap and the EFF will be reaching out to service providers to convince them to agree to the bill, and the more support they can show the better.

Share the campaign! Spread the word to help gather more signatures, and also to get the attention of companies.

For every 500 signatures and shares, Namecheap and its partners will donate $5000 to the EFF, up to a maximum of $25,000.

Internet Privacy Week continues until October 24th, and we'll be bringing you some extra coverage of privacy issues, as well as more information about the Bill Of Rights. Also check out coverage on the Namecheap blog.

from the clarifications-and-corrections dept

Copyright is one of the most important fields of law in the digital age, and also one of the most widely misunderstood. The EFF's Parker Higgins joins us to discuss to most common misconceptions about how copyright works, and how it's been abused.

from the ask-them-anything dept

Post sponsored by

As we noted yesterday, today is Move Your Domain Day at Namecheap, long-time supporters of Techdirt and a free and open internet. To kick things off, Namecheap founder and CEO Richard Kirkendall is doing a Reddit AMA starting at 8am PST today. Head on over to check it out and submit your questions — we think you'll agree that they have a great perspective on copyright, free speech, privacy, net neutrality and lots of other topics that we discuss here at Techdirt.

If you want to support the EFF, get yourself a new registrar, or both, then today is the day. Since 2011, Move Your Domain Day has raised nearly $250,000 for EFF, and this year continues the trend. Here's how it works:

Starting January 27th, you can transfer your .com, .net, .biz, .org or .info domain to Namecheap for only $3.98 (plus $0.18 ICANN fee where applicable), using coupon code NC15MYDD

When you transfer, they'll add another year to your domain free. Any shared hosting package (Value, Professional or Ultimate) will be 50% off when you use coupon code MYDDHOST15

For every domain transferred or hosting plan purchased, up to 10,000, Namecheap will donate $0.50 to EFF. The donation amount goes up to $1.00 per domain/hosting plan if they exceed 10,000. And if they exceed 20,000 domains transferred/hosting plans purchased, Namecheap will donate $1.50 for each product purchased.

from the good-deal-for-a-good-cause dept

Post sponsored by

If you've been a Techdirt reader since the days of SOPA/PIPA, you probably know that Namecheap is a big supporter of a free and open internet, and was one of the first registrars to speak out against the bills. More recently, they've been big supporters of Techdirt directly, providing matching funds to our crowdfunding campaign for net neutrality reporting and sponsoring our sitewide switch to HTTPS. In October, they were one of only two companies that got a perfect score on the EFF's ranking of service providers that stand up to copyright and trademark bullies, and many of us here at Techdirt use them for all our personal domain registration needs.

Now we're happy to team up with Namecheap and promote their latest campaign: Move Your Domain Day, happening tomorrow. It's a continuation of something they started with Reddit users in 2011, which so far has raised nearly $250,000 for the EFF. Here's how it works:

Starting January 27th, you can transfer your .com, .net, .biz, .org or .info domain to Namecheap for only $3.98 (plus $0.18 ICANN fee where applicable), using coupon code NC15MYDD

When you transfer, they'll add another year to your domain free. Any shared hosting package (Value, Professional or Ultimate) will be 50% off when you use coupon code MYDDHOST15

For every domain transferred or hosting plan purchased, up to 10,000, Namecheap will donate $0.50 to EFF. The donation amount goes up to $1.00 per domain/hosting plan if they exceed 10,000. And if they exceed 20,000 domains transferred/hosting plans purchased, Namecheap will donate $1.50 for each product purchased.

from the progress dept

We've joked about how James Clapper and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) like to claim that the various documents they've been declassifying and releasing in the post-Snowden era are decisions they've made out of the goodness of their transparency-loving hearts, when the reality is that much of it is in response to FOIA lawsuits from the EFF. When it comes to Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, the part of the law that covers PRISM and (more importantly) the direct "upstream" tapping of the internet backbone via companies like AT&T, EFF had asked for a variety of documents pertaining to how the program was run. After ODNI did everything possible to refuse to provide such documents in any meaningful way, EFF sued.

Following the Snowden revelations, and the sudden "we love transparency*" (*not really) attitude of the ODNI, it started re-reviewing the original redactions and (look at that!) suddenly realized that it didn't actually need to have wasted so much black ink on the originals. EFF continued to push back on certain redactions, and ODNI magically discovered even more wasted black ink. Eventually, huge portions of the various documents that had previously been withheld were revealed. EFF kept pushing, and asked the court to review some of the remaining redactions, just to make sure that ODNI wasn't hiding anything solely out of embarrassment, rather than for legitimate national security purposes. The court got to secretly review the unredacted document, asked some detailed questions of the DOJ, leading to even more redactions falling by the wayside. So, now, finally, after all of that, the judge has basically said that all of the remaining redactions are legitimate, and thus effectively rules "against" the EFF.

However, this is a pretty clear victory for the EFF, considering that during the course of the case it was able to remove many of the original redactions. Of course, this is still problematic, because it highlights how many of those original redactions were clearly improper, and it took this long and convoluted process (and Ed Snowden) before ODNI was willing to reveal these documents concerning a rather key program in how the NSA conducts surveillance.

from the because-secrecy dept

The ridiculous (and most likely illegal) gag orders around widely abused "National Security Letters" (NSLs) is pretty widely known. It's created absurd situations in which companies have had to go to court secretly without being able to admit that they were fighting on behalf of their users, except in rare cases where the gags are finally lifted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed two briefs on Friday challenging secret government demands for information known as National Security Letters (NSLs) with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The briefs—one filed on behalf of a telecom company and another for an Internet company—remain under seal because the government continues to insist that even identifying the companies involved might endanger national security.

While the facts surrounding the specific companies and the NSLs they are challenging cannot be disclosed, their legal positions are already public: the NSL statute is a violation of the First Amendment as well as the constitutional separation of powers.

We have yet to see any good reason for why the government can claim that the mere fact that a company has received a National Security Letter needs to be classified.

from the and-if-anyone-knows-about-chilling-effects... dept

For quite some time, the good folks at EFF have offered awesome NSA Spying Hoodies with their brilliantly re-imagined NSA logo:

You might notice the AT&T logo in the middle there. That's not there just for show. Many years before the world knew of Ed Snowden, an AT&T technician by the name of Mark Klein literally walked in the front door of the EFF's old offices, and revealed how the NSA was installing hardware directly on AT&T's premises to tap directly into the internet backbone, in order to collect basically all internet traffic.

This is the same hoodie that Snowden himself used to wear around the NSA office in Hawaii where he worked (his coworkers thought he was being ironic). Either way, the logo is pretty well known by now.

Around San Francisco this week, some were seen sporting Electronic Frontier Foundation T-shirts featuring a retooled N.S.A. logo with an eagle using its talons to plug into the American telecom network, symbolized by AT&T. Asked about the T-shirts, one AT&T executive, who asked not to be named, said they had a chilling effect.

“There are many of us at AT&T who are disturbed by what we’ve been hearing about the N.S.A.,” this person said. “But when you see that,” he said, pointing to the T-shirts, “a conversation becomes impossible.”

I don't think that cowardly exec knows what a "chilling effect" really means. I'd argue that secretly giving the NSA full access to the internet backbone, to collect whatever data they want is what creates a real chilling effect. Opening up pretty much just about everyone to intrusive and excessive surveillance by a secretive government agency? That's a chilling effect. Having someone wearing a t-shirt or hoodie that makes fun of your company for allowing such surveillance? No, that's not a chilling effect. It's the opposite. It's called exercising their right to expression.